The outcry is beginning. Obama is about to change his position on the treaty ban on torture.

Hopefully the voices will get loud, because in case you hadn’t noticed, Obama has developed a habit of saying one thing and doing another. He said he would close Guantánamo, then didn’t. He said he would get America out of Iraq for good, but the US is already back in the country bombing ISIS. He opposed the torture and cruel treatment of detainees on foreign soil, now he’s preparing to make it legal again. As The New York Times reported in an October 19th article, Obama looks set to adopt a Bush-era interpretation of the treaty ban on torture so that American intelligence officers and the military will once again be able to torture detainees outside of America:

The Obama administration has never officially declared its position on the treaty, and now, President Obama’s legal team is debating whether to back away from his earlier view. It is considering reaffirming the Bush administration’s position that the treaty imposes no legal obligation on the United States to bar cruelty outside its borders, according to officials who discussed the deliberations on the condition of anonymity.

The administration must decide on its stance on the treaty by next month, when it sends a delegation to Geneva to appear before the Committee Against Torture, a United Nations panel that monitors compliance with the treaty. That presentation will be the first during Mr. Obama’s presidency.

The torture debate will get academic and legalistic in the coming days, and moral lines will start to blur, but no matter what is said, remember that the whole discussion comes down to the question of whether or not to allow the inhuman abuse of a human being.

If there is any heart left in Obama at all he will ban torture unconditionally and end this for good.

—Adbusters

We know a lot now about what went on in those rooms:

Detainee began to cry … Visibly anxious … Very emotional … Detainee cries … Disturbed … Detainee began to cry … Butted SGT R in the eye … Bit the IV tube in two … Started moaning … Uncomfortable … Moaning … Began crying hard spontaneously … Crying and praying … Began to cry … Claimed to have been pressured into making a confession … Falling asleep … Very uncomfortable … On the verge of breaking … Angry … Detainee struggled … Detainee asked for prayer … Very agitated … Yelled … Tired … Agitated … Yelled for Allah … Started making odd faces … Near crying … Irritated … Annoyed … Detainee attempted to injure two guards … Became very violent and irate … Attempted to liberate himself … Struggled … Made several attempts to stand up … Screamed.

—Adapted from Mark Danner’s “Donald Rumsfeld Revealed,” a review of the filmThe Unknown Known and the book Known and Unknown: a Memoir in The New York Review of Books, January 2014.

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